- Author
-
Miller, J. H.
|
Smyth, K. C.
- Title
- Comparisons of Methane/Air Diffusion Flame Structure Data With Predictions of "Full" Chemical Mechanisms.
- Coporate
- National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD
- Report
-
Session A-5,
- Book or Conf
- Combustion Institute/Eastern States Section. Chemical and Physical Processes in Combustion. Fall Technical Meeting, 1990. December 3-5, 1990,
Orlando, FL,
37/1-4 p.,
1990
- Keywords
-
diffusion flames
|
methane
|
air
|
flame structure
|
mechanisms
|
radical concentrations
- Abstract
- The earliest mathematical treatment of diffusion flame structure was that of Burke and Schumann. Although incremental improvements to the Burke-Schumann model have been made over the years, it was not until recently that a new and more realistic approach to thinking about diffusion flame structure could be formulated. This can be traced to two improvements: the evolution of powerful computers and the development of the conserved scalar description of flame structure. The former provides a means to calculate the two-dimensional structure including detailed kinetics for laminar diffusion flames. The latter is a framework for the development of simplifications of the flame chemistry. Since a full numerical description of turbulent diffusion of turbulent diffusion flame structure is beyond our current capabilities, several research groups have attempted to reduce the number of chemical steps in basic oxidation mechanisms for combustion to as few as possible, while still providing an adequate description of the major species concentration and temperature profiles. Often the validation of these reduced mechamisms has been made by comparison with more complete chemical kinetic calculations. However, an important question to be posed is how well do these "full" calculations predict the actual flame structure. In this presentation, we compare our detailed experimental flame structure data with some of the computational results for laminar methane/air diffusion flames.